


Can't Go Back

by Celesma



Series: The Virtuous Woman [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-24
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:33:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27695612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celesma/pseuds/Celesma
Summary: "My name is Nancy Fitzgerald,” the girl said after a long, penetrating moment. "I died because of you."Bela's past mistakes return to haunt her as she, Sam, and Bobby must fight for survival against those bearing the Mark of the Witnesses.
Relationships: Castiel & Bela Talbot, Sam Winchester/Bela Talbot
Series: The Virtuous Woman [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1611997
Comments: 18
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The third story in my "Righteous Woman" AU series. For details and more information, please see [this link.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22358086/chapters/53413549)
> 
> Again, no guarantees that I can keep up a full-length Season 4 AU, but I've enjoyed writing it so far!

The first thing Bela did was reach for the gun at her hip. It was instinctual.  
  
It was also useless. The shot went straight through the girl—as she'd already known it would—left a lovely smoking pinprick in Bobby's wall. The girl didn't even spare a glance down at her unmarked chest, like some rookie ghost unaccustomed to invincibility might have. She just charged straight at her, face black and relentless as an oncoming train.  
  
Bela expected to hear Sam's voice in the next room, demanding to know what was happening, but all was deadly still. _Maybe he's made a run for it_ , Bela thought, the idea as mad as it was perfectly rational. _Maybe he's already jumped into the Impala and peeled out of here—  
  
_That hurt, even more than the girl's knuckles when they struck her across the chin. The impact sent her sprawling to the floor, her legs buckling beneath her. The pain from that was terrific, but the thought had hurt more.  
  
There was a handful of salt in her pocket. She seized it now and threw it in the ghost's general direction—she could barely see for the spots in her vision. The girl's body swept away above her, a stroke of paint smearing out of existence with the pass of a wet brush upon it.  
  
That had to have bought her a few seconds. Bela rose to her feet with dazed slowness. For one sudden, shameful second she nearly cried out for  
  
_(Castiel)  
  
_help, but even now—all alone and on the cusp of being murdered by what was a clearly a pissed-off spirit of the first order—she wasn't ready to resort to that. _Only **why** is this ghost so angry, _she wondered, just as the girl swooped back in for another go at her.  
  
"Fuck off," Bela hissed, but the girl stopped short of putting her hands on her, her movements apparently arrested by the pile of salt at Bela's feet. Bela fanned it towards her with her right foot, and the girl took another step back. "This isn't very fucking Catholic of you," Bela said with unexpected petulance.  
  
The girl looked even more angry, if such a thing was possible, but she still didn't move. "It's your fault," she cried. Bela started at the sound. Not only was she talking—a spirit so far gone with rage as she was wouldn't have a voice, wouldn't know what words were anymore—but her voice was so strangely sweet, so _very much_ the Catholic schoolgirl, that something in Bela's chest ached to hear it.  
  
Even so— "The hell it is," Bela returned. "I've never seen you before in my life."  
  
The girl's eyes narrowed to little pinpricks of contained rage, like black stars in a white sky. It left the air oily, thick. There was something of hellfire in this girl, only Bela knew now she didn't come from the pit. "My name is Nancy Fitzgerald," she said after a long, penetrating moment.  
  
"Good for you," Bela said. "Am I supposed to be familiar with you?"  
  
"No," the ghost _(Nancy)_ said. "You don't know me. And I don't know you. But I know that I died because of you."  
  
Bela shrugged, let her lips slip into a hateful smile. Her hand stole back into her pocket and grasped the handle of her useless .44. "Death happens every day, love. Got any proof that I had anything to do with yours? Or are you just having a snit at my expense?"  
  
"I was a secretary for the Monument Sheriff's Department," Nancy said, and Bela's smile faltered. "Sam and Dean Winchester were brought in as inmates on an anonymous tip on February 2, 2008. My last day alive. When the demon Lilith learned where they were being held, she went straight there and... well. You can probably guess what happened next, now can't you?"  
  
Bela's smile was gone now—wiped off her face like crayon. Her eyes had gone wide and unblinking; vaguely, she realized she probably resembled a fish. "I wasn't the one who told Lilith where they were," she finally said.  
  
"No," Nancy agreed. "But you didn't have to. You knew that Lilith wanted Sam and Dean. That was the price for your freedom—for you to live, they had to die. Yes, I know about your deal," she said, as Bela opened her mouth. "And you knew that once you made that phone call, wherever they ended up, she'd come for them. To finish the job. You just chose not to... think too much about how she'd do it." The girl's head cocked slightly for an effect that was nearly endearing.  
  
Bela couldn't speak. She couldn't move. Her fingers had frozen around the hardwood grip. If she could have raised her hand to her face, she would have felt it as cold and white as the ghost facing her. _Accusing_ her.  
  
"If you'd turned on the television," Nancy was saying now. "At _any_ point. You'd have known what happened to me and the people I worked with... my friends... but no. All you cared about was yourself. All you cared about was saving your own life. Other people—they never even factored in for a second."  
  
Nancy was drawing nearer. In lieu of doing something useful, like firing another shot or seeking out more salt, Bela's eyes fell helplessly to the cross around the girl's neck. If she looked closer, she could see that it was joined by a familiar brown leather strap. A scapular.  
  
_I had one of those,_ she considered, the thought so far away that it seemed to come from someone else, was merely a passing stranger through her brain. _Right down to the Sacred Heart and the Crown of Thorns. I even believed in its promises, once._ There was a tattoo, too, stamped in dark ink on the generously covered décolletage; the design was esoteric, one she couldn't place. Her eyes snapped back up at the intrusion of Nancy's voice, now on the edge of a scream as the girl said:  
  
"And it wasn't enough, that Lilith killed us. She made my friends—Officer Henriksen—she made all of them watch as—as—"  
  
She choked on it, couldn't get the words out. Bela waited in an agony of silence.  
  
"She _tortured_ me." The voice that finally emerged from the ghost sounded like it came from a creature, a maltreated dog's whine given human form. "Dean and Sam weren't there, and she was so _angry_ , and she had all the time in the world... forty-five minutes, Bela! Forty-five minutes that she spent ripping the flesh off my bones! _Don't tell me you don't know what that's like_! _I never stopped screaming_!"  
  
A howl of such anguish, fear, and terror poured out of her throat that the casing of the old house seemed to shake with it, to peel apart like black skin around a rotting fruit. And then Nancy was moving—ignoring the salt, ignoring the gun—her arm snapping forward to wrap her fingers around Bela's throat and squeeze, bringing to bear every last ounce of supernatural strength within her. Her face blazed hot with tears.  
  
"You think I wasn't praying to my guardian angel to be saved? Screaming to be rescued? Why does someone like _you_ get to be saved? When Lilith was tearing me to pieces, and all because of you—"  
  
" _I didn't do it on purpose_!" The words seemed to be choked out of Bela as that iron fist crushed her throat, a waste disposal working in reverse, disgorging her past life's atrocities. "I just wanted—the Winchesters—off my—"  
  
"No! You don't get to blame this on them. They tried to help us. Even when they were our prisoners, they cared." Nancy was still crying. "You could have thought about it for _one second_. Who did you think was going to be at the station? Just a handful of criminals no one was going to miss? No innocent victims with families, people who loved them? You really thought Lilith was going to come for Sam and Dean and just _leave us alone_?"  
  
None of this was new, Bela had the state of mind to consider, even as the vicious fingers were tightening, filling up her head with white fog. It wasn't new. Not really. She'd heard it all before. Her mother deferring a swallow of her precious Valium long enough to chide her daughter for making a fuss over nothing, her father telling her _what did you expect, trotting around in that slip of a dress._ Alastair's favorite son leaning over her with the scythe, beetle-black eyes pinned to her like her father's hands to her dress, lovingly recounting a sin of hers with each strip of flesh the curved blade stripped away. It had got downright Pavlovian. If she could move her head she would have checked the floor, sought out the strips of skin that she was sure must be lying around her feet like rotting bandages.  
  
Nancy was right. She knew exactly what it was like.  
  
What Nancy didn't know was what it was like to deserve it.  
  
_I'm not that person anymore_.  
  
_I don't want to **be** that person anymore.  
  
He said I was—virtuous—  
  
_Nancy laughed.  
  
"No angel's going to take away what you've done." The air changed again, and Bela was lifted off her feet. Now her back was up against the wall—she was going to be put straight through it, if she didn't do something—  
  
"You act like you're the only person in this world who's ever been hurt," Nancy continued, her eyes glassy with unfathomable pain. "So you can do whatever you want, and the rest of us can jump off a bridge... well, here's a piece of wisdom for you. _It's rough all over._ You think I never had a hard life? That I didn't have to go through crap as bad as you? Well I _did_ , and still—I would never live the life you chose."  
  
The words, protesting and reproachful, floated through the air like dust in sunlight. Bela knew it wasn't her ears that could hear them—she couldn't hear anything anymore now, not over the high whine in her skull, a brain screaming for oxygen. It was her spirit. Those words, borne so far above any physical medium, had burrowed themselves right into her soul: the thing she liked to pretend didn't exist, the thing that subsequent to her denial of it had been dragged straight to hell.  
  
The pain of knowing such was terrible. So much more than the fingers around her throat.  
  
"I'm sorry," she whispered, and again she didn't hear it, but she hoped Nancy could. Her skull felt near to bursting; her teeth, grit nearly to pieces to avoid discharging a mouthful of blood down her blouse. "I'm sorry."  
  
And miraculously, unbelievably, that seemed to do something. Nancy's eyes softened, the darkness in them draining to gauze with her sorrow. Her grip relaxed. Bela gasped desperately for air; her brain, equally distressed, worked to connect that to something. _So even now, Nancy Fitzgerald is fighting...  
  
_But Nancy Fitzgerald was just a person, just a human girl. Whatever malevolent force had her in its grip, willpower alone wouldn't stop it. Nancy-the-possessed resurfaced as quickly as the real girl had tried to, and the ghost's empty hand rose to make bone-splitting contact with the side of Bela's face, igniting a snarl of blue-black stars in her vision. The fingers around the crumpled paper column of her throat resumed their vise, eager to finish the job—  
  
There was a crack like a gunshot. Sam Winchester burst into the empty room, the salt round from his shotgun having collapsed Nancy's form into thin air once more. His hair was untidy and stuck out around his head in little spikes, and he looked like he'd just seen a few demons himself.  
  
Bela nearly wept at the sight of him. But her body's demand for air was too great to be ignored. Her chest heaved and her mouth gaped, releasing a fine stream of blood all over her shirt just as she'd feared.  
  
"Bela," Sam said as he closed the distance between them. He looked calmer now, marginally, but his voice was rough and his eyes still bore traces of shock. He held a spotless white handkerchief out to her when he saw the blood. "Shit. How bad did she get you? Are you gonna be okay?"  
  
"Y... yes," Bela said, in a pitiful little sob that instantly aroused her disgust but Sam didn't seem to notice. "I—" There was something in her mouth. She steadied herself with a deeper breath, then spat out a bloodied molar. "I'm fine," she whispered, grasping the cloth in shaking fingers and pressing it to her chin. It was crimson in seconds.  
  
"Shit," Sam said again. His gaze dropped to Bela's neck, where a lovely purple bruise was no doubt forming. "We'll get that looked at." He shook his head and placed the shotgun on the floor. "Come on." And then he was taking both of her elbows in his hands, drawing her upper body to meet his with no effort at all, a movement as exceptionally gentle as it was swift. Bela nearly fell against him when he bent to retrieve his gun; but presently she found her legs, or enough of them to follow him slowly out of the room and into the hall. She could feel her heartbeat now in her ears, a tiny roar like a distant waterfall.  
  
"Bobby's got a panic room," Sam explained as they made their way through the house. "We'll be safe there from any—"  
  
"I don't recall ending our conversation, Sam, do you?" a voice muttered behind them. Sam whirled around and aimed his shotgun. Bela fell back against the wall in an instinctive bid for safety. The young hunter stepped in front of her, but not even his wide back concealed the sight of the girl that faced them, brunette and skinny and college-aged.  
  
"Meg," Sam breathed. The sound came out of him like a punch. Bela's eyes darted towards Bobby's study.  
  
"Masters? The demon?" she croaked without thinking, and the girl threw back her head to howl with laughter.  
  
" _The demon_? Wow! That's a good one." Her eyes blazed bright with delighted—yet enraged, so clearly enraged—malice. Another of those strange tattoos adorned her wrist. _She's another one_ , Bela realized. _Another ghost like Nancy._ _What, do they make them in a sodding factory?  
  
_Sam fired off a shot, and the girl—Meg?—disappeared. An instant later, however, she was back, and several feet closer.  
  
"Tell her, Sam," the girl said. Her grin was wicked and utterly unamused. "I really want to hear it in your own words. How you and your brother let me die because you couldn't just _stop and think_. And I thought Dean was supposed to be the meathead."  
  
Sam seemed to wilt on the spot. "I'm sorry, Meg," he said. "We wanted to save you... we didn't know..."  
  
"You haven't even told her the best part," Meg continued. "The part where my little sister killed herself after seeing my dead body in the morgue. How lost and hopeless she was when I was gone. That's on you, Sam."  
  
Sam wasn't denying it. The tall hunter shuddered briefly with the blow of the accusation, absorbed it. Bela didn't see how he could stand beneath the weight of such guilt. Considering how long he'd been hunting, Meg had to be one of dozens of people he'd failed to save. Dozens of people that he had to carry around in his bones, harbor within his heart. If she was honest with herself, it was the reason she had avoided the whole business altogether. She needed to travel light.  
  
_It didn't stop you from hurting people,_ a voice like Nancy's snarled inside her _.  
  
_"I _prayed_ for help. I _begged_ for help. All you had to do was recite some crummy Latin and I would've been free. My sister would still be alive. But no—all you cared about was yourself, your own stupid agenda!"  
  
Again Sam said nothing. Not one word to defend himself. It was outrageous. "Shut up," Bela whispered, into his silence. Barely audible, and yet both of them turned to her as if she'd sounded a klaxon. "He did the best he could. If he didn't know you were possessed, then he didn't know. At least my ghost knew where to assign blame."  
  
Sam's eyes were wide as they locked onto her own. Wide with... what? Disbelief? Gratitude? Shock at her utter stupidity and cheek? She didn't have time to parse it, because the look on Meg's face was darkening by orders of magnitude.  
  
"You don't know a _thing_ ," she snarled. Actually _snarled_ , until her face was an animal-like rictus of pain and rage. "After all the nothing he did to save me, and then consorting with a damn demon—"  
  
The ghost charged towards them at top speed—borne now on feet that didn't even bother to touch the ground—and Sam rolled on his heels and fired a salt round so quickly that both of them were thrown back a step by the impact. Meg shrieked and didn't reappear.  
  
Nancy, though. She was standing on Bobby's carpet, right where Meg had been. Sam's face lit up with recognition at once.  
  
"Nancy," he said, and his voice actually sounded close to tears. The shotgun slipped down his shoulder an inch. "Nancy, I'm so sorry—"  
  
"Move, Sam," Nancy said calmly. She wasn't even looking at him. Bela felt her gaze more than she saw it, the weight of it pressing on her lungs like an anvil, stealing the air from her throat. _Eager for seconds, then._ "It's her that I want. Bela Talbot."  
  
Sam's jaw grew taut. His hazel eyes narrowed as he swallowed his tears. "You can't have her, Nancy," he said. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder.  
  
"Then you'll die too." Nancy sounded sad.  
  
"Why her?" No doubt the question was a stalling measure. Nancy's head tipped forward and she chuckled.  
  
"You already know, Sam."  
  
"I'm just as responsible," Sam countered, which was such a stupid thing to say that Bela almost swatted him where he stood. "I didn't save you."  
  
"I care about intent." Nancy didn't roll her eyes, but her voice dripped with the sentiment. "This girl never cared about anyone but herself."  
  
Sam's stance never wavered. "I don't think that's true."  
  
"I don't care what you think." Nancy was through with niceties. "I want my pound of flesh, Sam. Give it to me."  
  
She took a step forward: and another, and another. A few more and she would be standing practically beneath Sam Winchester's nose. _Ripping out his heart..._ Bela scanned their surroundings. Was there anything that could help them? The room was no different from any other in Bobby's house. Mahogany endtables. Antique lamps. Dusty, heavy books piled to the heavens, sure to harm them more than any ghost. Useless.  
  
Then her eyes moved up, and she saw the chandelier.  
  
"Iron," she said.  
  
Sam was slow to see it. "What?" he whispered back, his face barely budging from Nancy.  
  
Bloody Winchesters— _"Iron,"_ she said again, fiercely but no louder; being choked within an inch of her life had sapped her voice of all strength. She clutched his jacket sleeve with one hand, jabbed her pointer skyward with the other. "Iron! The chandelier is—"  
  
And finally, mercifully, he understood. The gun moved too slowly, though, and Nancy surged forward like a tidal wave to knock it out of his hands. Bela seized the .44 from her pocket and fired wildly into the ceiling, until the surface cracked and groaned above the insupportable weight and the chandelier came crashing down on Nancy's head. Bela had just one second to behold the expression of incredible surprise on Nancy's face before she vanished in a cloud of dust.  
  
"Let's go," Bela grit out, stomping through the dust that was more like smoke. Sam stared after her, looking dazed, but recovered quickly. He snatched up his gun from the chair where Nancy had flung it and ran after her.  
  
He led her towards an old staircase. They headed downstairs, into the dark, feet pounding a procession of cold hard shelves for what seemed like miles into the earth but was probably only a few feet, until the stairs emptied into a basement that Bela had never seen before. Before them stood an enormous, iron-reinforced door that looked like the opening to  
  
_(hell)  
  
_nowhere in particular that Bela wanted to go. To her dismay, Sam headed straight for it.  
  
"Bobby's panic room," he explained at her expression, which must have been particularly egregious because the lighting in here was terrible. "It's warded against... everything." He blew out a breath that lifted the bangs off his forehead. "So we'll be safe. I hope."  
  
"Lucky for us we... came to the house of... an obsessed bastard," Bela whispered, looking up and down at the thousands of grains of salt coated in paste on the door's surface, as Sam slapped his palm hard three times on the metal frame.  
  
There was a growl—a _human_ growl—behind the door as it popped free by the tiniest of increments. "I heard that," Bobby Singer said, his head peering through the sliver-thin gap at them. Bela didn't have time to apologize to their would-be savior and beg to be let into the clubhouse before the old hunter threw his entire frame against the door to open it and gasped: "Now get your asses in here!"  
  
Sam and Bela herded themselves in and helped Bobby throw the door closed. To her immense (and forever to be unvoiced) relief, the ghosts remained howling on the other side of the door, didn't immediately pass through to eviscerate them. Sam hurried to make sure the door was secure, while Bobby took a hard sit on one of the room's only two chairs: cold hard folding chairs, the type American wrestlers used to whack each other bloody.  
  
Bobby had constructed the place for survival, not for comfort; that much was clear in a single glance around the circular perimeter of the room. Beneath her feet was the hugest devil's trap that she had ever seen; its points reached out to nearly touch the dark iron walls, and if she looked up she saw its twin in the room's ventilation, a metal extraction fan that had been warped with no small amount of effort to resemble a second trap. There was one plain cot, a handful of low wooden structures that she recognized as desks and a bookcase, and a large dresser filled to bursting with weapons and survivalist gear, the latter of which included what had to be a year's worth of military-grade MREs and a transistor radio. Probably the warmest thing in the room was the distinct odor of whiskey and deodorant, and a pinup of some American actress on the wall—two facts that Bela did _not_ find comforting, especially if the situation conspired for her to be trapped in an enclosed space with two men for more than twenty-four hours.  
  
Sam turned to where Bela was looking and his eyebrows lifted at the poster. "Oh," he said. His gaze flicked over to Bela, and then down at the floor. "Bobby," he breathed, looking at the devil's trap like it was the most interesting thing he'd seen all day. "When'd you—um, have time to do all this?"  
  
"I had a weekend off," the older hunter huffed. His face was bright with perspiration and he was breathing somewhat hard, but he otherwise seemed unharmed. Bela hoped but did not expect that he'd avoided having a vindictive visitor of his own.  
  
"Impressive," she allowed, looking around again, her whisper admitting only the tiniest degree of sarcasm. Sam looked up sharply at the sound and marched over to her.  
  
"We need to get that looked at," he insisted.  
  
"We have bigger problems," she replied, but her voice betrayed her, and soon she was coughing hard enough to dislocate a rib. "Stop it," she managed to choke out, as Sam went to the armory and began rummaging through the weapons.  
  
"Bobby, where do you keep the first aid? Never mind—found it." The young hunter pulled out a white box and a tub of petroleum jelly, tucked them into the crook of his arm with businesslike alacrity. "How about a cold pack? Got any of those?"  
  
"Should be the drawer to the left." Bela straightened and paced to the other side of the room, which suddenly seemed more like a prison with guards.  
  
"Let him help you, girl," Bobby said, and to her revulsion his face was actually pinched with concern. "You sound like you smoked a dozen packs between now and this morning."  
  
"She was strangled, Bobby," Sam said, like Bela wasn't even there. Some small part of her continued to howl at the indignation. Then Sam was back, brandishing his newfound weapons, walking too quickly for her to do anything but back up until her ankles fetched up against the cot. Sam pushed her down with one hand to her shoulder, easily, pinning her arse to the mattress and holding her there like she was a bug in a collection.  
  
"Get away from me," Bela squawked. "I don't need your help."  
  
Now Bobby actually look amused. "You sound like his brother."  
  
"Shut up," Bela hissed, at the same time Sam said: "Bela, I have to look at it. It could get really bad."  
  
"Who cares," Bela spat. And then, before she even realized what she was saying: "You should have just left me with Nancy—"  
  
Now her throat hurt even more. There was a lump in it, quickly rising; and she sensed with sudden, assured horror that to let it reach her head would be to unleash the first spate of tears.  
  
She had to stop it, had to head it off, _had to stop it—_ "Why don't you just admit already there's no God, Sam?" she hissed up into his face, viciously, actually forcing him to raise his hand and draw back a step. "It's a fucking fairy tale. You know how I know that? Because there is no way— _at all—_ God would ever see me do anything but roast on a spit. Demons I will give you—fucking _angels_ , fine—but _God?_ No. You saw that girl. You heard what she said. Nobody who did what I did to her deserves to come back from the pit, and if God existed, He would fucking well know that."  
  
It worked. Thank _somebody_ , it worked. She felt better already; the lump was retreating by slow degrees into the black pit of her stomach, and the only price she had to pay was burn her throat beyond raw. She tried to speak again—spit more venom, more like—but the only sound to escape her lips now was a pathetic squeak.  
  
Sam looked at her, eyes flinty. "You done?" he said. When she didn't respond, he stepped back into her space and knelt in front of her. Bela made an outraged sound, and his face looked so dark that for a second she thought he was going to hurt her—but he was only inspecting the wound on her neck, peering at it with an intensity that betrayed that the wound was indeed very bad.  
  
"You've got some cuts here," he said, pointing but not touching with his finger. "They're going to become infected if we don't take care of them."  
  
_Aren't you the nice nursemaid,_ she thought at him, hoping she could somehow burn the thought into his brain. He ignored her and the room filled with a bleached-sweet smell as he took a pump of hand sanitizer from the white box—the only means of disinfecting his hands in lieu of soap and running water—then touched an antiseptic wet wipe with impersonal deliberateness to her neck.  
  
Bela's hand flew up, seized his. _I'll do it._ He shook his head.  
  
"No mirrors. You won't see where to do it. Bobby didn't think of everything, it seems."  
  
"Watch your mouth," Bobby chided, without much heat.  
  
Sam didn't say anything, but a corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile only Bela saw. The girl, for her part, could only stare at him defenselessly, storm-blue eyes locked with hazel ones, until finally her hand dropped to her side and her gaze slid away to look nowhere, lips pressed into a hard frustrated line.  
  
How much time passed after Sam's hands began to move upon her was unclear. She sensed slow, careful passes of the cloth upon her skin, which darkened from white to red beneath his fingers and had to be constantly replaced. It should have hurt—should have hurt like hell, if all the times she'd had to run a sterilized needle through lacerated skin or soak an injury in peroxide were any indication—but the young hunter's large hands were possessed of remarkable cleverness, and they glided without effort over the vulnerable and exposed places of her flesh, never disturbing the veins in which cowered the uneasy pulse of her heart. Almost querulously she waited for the pain— _where was the pain?_ —but it did not come. 

After a long moment in which she warred with herself not to slap away his hand and bolt out of the chamber, she determined it. There was no scythe, no black eyes, no favored son of Alastair's. Just Sam.

Sam was unaware of this. The young hunter was committed to a thorough cleansing of the wound, almost as if he didn't have to think about it, like he had done this a thousand times before and would do it a thousand times more still. He never raised his eyes to look at her, just kept them focused on the cuts, assessing his work as he moved. At one point a curl of her hair fell forward, and Sam brushed it away without hesitation; those fingers, so thoughtlessly gentle, sent a small but profound tremor through her flesh. Her hands bunched into fists on the scratchy bedclothes.  
  
To drop out of attack mode, into this strange new way of being, happened almost without awareness. Certainly without consent. Bela's thoughts moved to the strains of Sam's steady breathing, shifting from one wild image to another. Meg's accusations, Nancy's rage... Sam's words.  
  
_This girl never cared about anyone but herself.  
  
I don't think that's true.  
_  
"Listen to me," Sam said. The sound of his voice in the lengthening silence—the sudden uncertainty in it—startled her so that her face bent almost to his. "I..." For the first time his fingers trembled. "I get that having to face that ghost shook you up. I know you're still thinking you shouldn't have been saved. I don't claim to have all the answers but I know this..."  
  
A loose roll of bandages, coated thinly with a layer of the petroleum jelly, appeared in his hands. Wordlessly she lifted her hair, and he wound the cotton loops around her throat.  
  
"We both saw Castiel. We both know he's for real, and we both know he needs our help. I'm not going to let you give up just because you feel bad about some mistakes you made. If it was gonna be like that, Bobby and I... we would have given up hunting ages ago."  
  
Instinctively, Bela's gaze flicked over to Bobby. To her shock, the old man sat staring sightlessly at a book in his lap, the lines in his downcast gaze heavy with a weight she had never seen on his face before. After a long moment, he lifted himself off the chair with a much older man's effort and shuffled slowly to the bookcase.  
  
"I don't know anything now that I didn't know before," Sam continued, with renewed conviction. "And I still say there's a reason you were saved. I still say there's a reason to keep fighting. So just... I don't know. Don't tap out. Not now."  
  
He snipped the last length of cotton with a tiny pair of medical scissors, pressed it closed with one fingertip. After putting everything back into the white box, he picked up a small blue bag at his side and shook it—one of those instant cold compression packs. "You've got some bad bruising," he said, his mask one of the careful medical professional once more. "Keep this on for twenty minutes. There's painkillers if it gets to be too bad."  
  
And Bela found that even if she could talk, she wouldn't have known what to say.

* * *

It didn't take long for them to piece together what had happened.  
  
The room, most fortunately, was proofed from a good deal of sounds, so no one had to tolerate the howling of the dead while Bobby explained how he'd already tried to ring up four different hunters for information when Bela had first turned up on his doorstep claiming to be resurrected from the dead—only no one had picked up, not even after several increasingly irritated voicemails, and he'd been seriously considering paying a visit to one of them this morning when Bobby's "houseguests" (Bobby invoked heavy usage of the finger quotes here) had shown up.  
  
"Olivia Lowry was dependable as death and taxes before three days ago," Bobby said. "The day Bela came back. But now..." His face slowly filled with dread as the imaginable implications caught up with him.  
  
Bela gave a slight nod. _Now, just dependable as death._ Sam caught the gesture. "You think these ghosts had anything to do with her going dark?" he asked.  
  
"Yeah... shit..." Bobby looked devastated. Bela realized that the older hunter had already decided Olivia Lowry was dead. It was a hunter's instinct, and one that was rarely wrong. "Can't confirm anything without going over there, but Olivia wouldn't hold out on me, not for anything... and the others, I can't see them doing that either. This has to be related."  
  
"Related to Bela coming back?" Sam ventured.  
  
"Yeah. I—" Bobby jumped like he'd been lit up with a cattle prod. The pile of heavy books he'd gathered in his arms—they had each of them grabbed a stack to start hunting for answers—he unceremoniously dumped to the floor, as he rushed back to the bookcase and returned with a remarkably slim volume in hand. "These ghosts," he said, urgently. "What'd they all have in common?"  
  
Bela's eyebrows rose until they nearly hit her hairline. _They all want to kill us?  
  
_Again Sam interpreted the body language. "They're angry at us," he said, more placatingly.  
  
Bobby's head bobbed furiously on his neck. "Exactly," he affirmed. "You with Meg Masters, Bela with Nancy, and me with... Sarah and Rebecca."  
  
He did not elaborate, and Bela did not ask. Then—  
  
"The mark," she croaked. Both hunters strained to hear her voice.  
  
_The scapular, the tattoo, the strange black circle—_ She mimed frantically for a pen, and Sam brought it to her. Immediately she cracked open one of the leathery books at her disposal and scrawled on the first blank page a crude approximation of the thing she'd seen on Meg Masters and Nancy Fitzgerald's bodies. Bobby looked inexpressibly put out to see her drawing in one of his valued tomes, but his expression changed when the light of recognition dawned in his eyes; and he opened the skinny book in his hand, his fingers flying over the pages until he found the one he wanted.  
  
"This," he said, tapping the page, then turning it around for both Sam and Bela's inspection. The illustrated figure—made much more ominous by the detail supplied by a real artist—was a match.  
  
"The ghosts all had these tattoos. What does all of this mean?" Sam's eyes traveled down the page, studying the tiny stub of text beneath the picture. "Says here something about the _mark of the witnesses..._ " _  
  
_"Old prophecy." Bobby's voice was grim. " _Balls_ old prophecy. Someone forced these ghosts to rise—actually, I'll be more specific, forced these people who had died _unnaturally_ to rise. That's what left the mark on 'em. Think of the worst hangover you can imagine. Then multiply that by a thousand thousands. They would've woken up in screaming agony. No wonder..."  
  
Bela thought of Nancy Fitzgerald being in _(heaven)_ wherever she was, then being dragged to the earthly plane with a skull-bursting headache. Only your skull couldn't burst, you had no real body, you had no relief, and so maybe you just decided you'd take all your pain out on the people who helped put you in the next world without even the benefit of a supernatural aspirin.  
  
"They're folks we couldn't save," Bobby concluded. The book snapped shut in his hands with a sense of terminal finality. "Or didn't save. I guess it don't matter." He didn't look at Bela.  
  
"Who," Bela rasped.  
  
Bobby turned to her with slow, reluctant confusion, then shrugged as he put together her query. "If you had three guesses, who would you put your money on?"  
  
Bela stiffened. "I'd guess Lilith every time," Sam interjected darkly. "This has to be part of the war that Castiel warned us about. But Bobby, this _mark of the witnesses_ thing—that's the part I don't get. It almost sounds... biblical or something."  
  
Bobby froze. He looked at them as if the very last thing in the world he wanted to do was share whatever he was going to say next. At length he opened his mouth and said warily:  
  
"The prophecy—"  
  
There was a tremendous bang outside the chamber. The door didn't budge, not an inch; but every piece of furniture in the room jumped with the impact of four enraged ghosts throwing whatever they could avail themselves of directly at it. The pinup girl dropped to the floor like a rock.  
  
Sam immediately went to the door. "It'll hold," Bobby insisted, but the cords that stood to attention in his neck were beaded with excess sweat. He ripped off his old baseball cap and fanned his face furiously. The younger hunter drew back a step, glaring through the tiny window at the top of the door's frame.  
  
"They're really out for blood," he reported, voice pitched with alarm. Bobby swore.  
  
"Look, kids, we don't have time to sit here pondering how we'll die. Book's got a spell here that should send them back to where they came from."  
  
"That's great," Sam said, encouraged, but Bobby was shaking his head.  
  
"You think we're that lucky? The spell requires a fire," the old man growled. "You're gonna have to find a way to get to my study." _Where the fireplace is_ , neither of his younger companions had to be reminded.  
  
There was a beat of bewildered silence. "How," Bela finally said.  
  
Bobby didn't miss a trick. "We head out with guns blazing," he said, replacing his cap on his head like an American CO shoving on a ballistic helmet. "And we pray God wants you alive long enough to extend some damned divine intervention."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most Bela-centric S04 rewrites feature Abby's parents as the ghosts that confront her. I didn't do that here because whatever I could write has already been done better in those stories, and also for another reason (revealed near the end of the story).


	2. Chapter 2

For the next several minutes no one spoke. They didn't have to. All they needed to concern themselves with now was arming themselves to the gills, and in that respect Bobby's weekend project was more than paying for itself. The only sounds to echo like footfalls in the room were those of salt-filled shells sliding into shotgun chambers, iron bars being shoved into waistbands, huge tubs of Morton salt ( _non-iodized_ , Bela noted, a fact that perhaps was not so desirable if they planned on seasoning the MREs and living in here for the rest of time but didn't merit a single damn where dispatching the dead was concerned) being seized and upended into hip flasks. These were none of them the typical weapons one would choose for survival—at least not in some of the more mundane circles Bela used to run in—but then this went a step beyond breaking and entering to possess the odd occult effect or black market deals with _mafiosi_. Bela had disposed of the cold pack and was hoping to find a charm or two to secret on her person when Sam broke the silence. 

"Okay." His voice fell heavy on the stale air. When Bela turned to look—Bobby only seemed to deal in pendants inscribed with the heptagram Seal of Solomon, excellent against demons but of little help against raving spirits—she saw that he had shed his overcoat and rolled up his flannel sleeves. His shotgun was back in his hands, fully loaded. All he needed now was a touch of war paint to set off those intense hazel eyes. "What exactly is our plan here?"

"We're gonna have to Scooby Doo it," Bobby said. "Split up," he added, mistaking the look of skepticism on Bela's face for one of ignorance of the animated Great Dane. The young thief placed a hand on her hip and let her eyes roll to the ceiling. _I haven't a scooby why you think I'm that clueless. I'm_ ** _British_** _, not an alien._

Sam, so good at silently reading her mind, gave no indication that he had noticed this. "Where do you need us to go?" he asked, his head bent to check that his double-knotted shoelaces were in no danger of coming apart. Sensible, but that put a damper on the image of the hardbitten warrior running towards a blood-soaked battlefield. 

"Well, that's not hard to figure out," Bobby replied, peering intently into his book as though he was trying to memorize the contents. "One of us needs to hang out by the fireplace to get the ritual started—that'll be me—and the rest of us need to track down the spell ingredients." 

_Of course **we** would be the ones going on the deadly fetch quest,_ Bela thought peevishly. Bobby would have the benefit of a salt circle, at least, but as for _them_ —the ghosts would be coming at them from all directions. 

Bobby's eyes lifted from his book and he conceded with a nod when he saw her expression. "Yeah, I know. Trust me, this is not what I want. But I'm the only one who can read this mumbo-jumbo; and I can get the fire going fastest, besides. Been doing it every winter now for the last twenty years," he concluded, with a smile that really wasn't one. 

"I can't split up with Bela." Sam's voice was grim. "Nancy almost killed her." 

Now that _really_ pissed her off. Bela seized the book closest to hand—the old man made a sound that resided somewhere between impotent anger and resignation—and once more slammed pen to page. 

I CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. AND LAST TIME I CHECKED I WAS THE ONE WHO SAVED YOUR LIFE BIRD BOY 

Sam's mouth fell open at that. Then, once he had regained his bearings: "Look, at least she doesn't want my head on a stick!" he protested hotly. "I just don't get why you can't—" 

Presumably he went on in this fashion for some seconds. Bela had already forgotten to listen, though. Something about that first thing he'd said had abruptly birthed another idea, one more deserving of her attention: a darkly absurd image of a content and sated Nancy, happily prancing around Bobby's sitting room in her little pink vest, brandishing a stick on which Bela's own head was mounted like a Turkish kebab. In this Norman Rockwell monstrosity, Sam was cowering on the carpet, hands covering his head, suffering the indignity of being completely ignored. She tried to match this to what Bobby had said; that the spell only involved _t_ _hose we didn't save_ , that it inspired them irrevocably to kill those who failed to protect them. 

It didn't add up, though. That is— _Nancy_ didn't add up. 

Sam was still rambling on when she put up a hand for silence. She still hadn't worked it out, but she never would if he didn't shut up. 

The facts were this: 

Nancy had almost killed her. 

_(because she got past the salt you threw at her)_

And Nancy didn't want to hurt Sam. Not until he'd threatened to get in the way of who she really wanted.

 _(because Nancy had said)_

_(had said)_

There. She had it. She said—nothing, because her voice was still gone on holiday, it seemed. She returned to the book to write. Now when she thrust the freshly vandalized page at them, the two hunters drank in the words: 

I CARE ABOUT INTENT 

For one moment Sam's face was empty of comprehension. Then: " _Oh_ ," he cried, turning to Bobby so quickly that the older hunter jumped back a step. His face was shining, shocked, like a boy who suddenly remembered how to do his sums. "Bobby, if the ghosts are angry at the people who _couldn't_ save them, then why didn't Nancy want to hurt me?" 

Bobby was looking none too fond of this delay. "What are you talking about?" 

"Nancy didn't want to hurt me," Sam repeated. "She told me to get out of the way—said she only wanted Bela, that she _cared about intent_. Would a ghost driven by rage be able to—to _reason_ like that? I mean, _I_ was the one who couldn't save her! So why would she..." 

"I don't know, Sam," Bobby said, and the exasperation that colored his voice now was not unkind. Bela had the feeling this was not the first time the older hunter had spoken to his charge like this. "Look, I know you took it hard when she died, but I wouldn't go looking for some special meaning behind it. Maybe these ghosts just get attached to one person, blame everything on them, even if it don't make much sense to. At least—if she comes up on our asses, you could try playing interference with her," he continued, suddenly inspired to hedge a bit. "If she really isn't after you, you'll be safe, and Bela's chances of survival look a lot better." 

Bela's pen flew over the page as he spoke. 

WHEN SHE ATTACKED ME EARLIER, SHE RESISTED THE MARK. JUST FOR A 2ND BUT STILL 

She didn't write _because I said sorry_. It didn't seem to matter, to bear mention. No matter what Sam believed in about living down the past. The young hunter, for his part, looked like he was thinking very hard; he had lost the initial thread, the one he had hoped to pull to untangle this whole mess, but continued to chase after it, as evidenced by the long and searching look he exchanged with Bela. _He knows I'm on to something,_ she thought. To help him along, Bela wrote: 

TELL US WHAT HAPPENED IN MONUMENT 

Sam blinked, but his answer was instant in coming. "Dean and I were attacked by demons in the lockup," he said. "But... you already knew that," he added, puzzlement radiating from his eyes. 

Bela sighed. 

I MEANT WHAT HAPPENED WHILE THE DEMONS WERE ATTACKING YOU FOOL 

She underlined the operative word three times. An annoyed sound escaped Sam's lips, but the young hunter swiftly moved on. "We got rid of the demons," he said. "We got away. The fed that was after us—Victor Henriksen, I'm sure you already know him—he helped, along with Nancy and some others. Most of them—died." 

He wasn't saying it to be hurtful, just relating facts. It was still only through a cocktail of excruciating effort and practiced cynicism that Bela held his gaze. He was right about one thing; she had known _exactly_ who Henriksen was, had counted on the man's fanatical pursuit of justice to bring about a speedy apprehension of the Winchesters. He'd succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. (What she didn't know or want to think about was who or how many died.) 

"We thought we exorcised all of the demons." Sam's voice had lowered, grown anguished. "But in the chaos, one must have gotten away... it gave Lilith our location. It wouldn't have happened if..." He paused, moistened his lips, and took a little breath, seemingly to anchor himself. "At one point Nancy offered to sacrifice herself to save everyone." 

This time Bobby was the one to inquire. "What sacrifice?" he asked, in that constant harangued-beagle tone in which Bobby Singer managed to phrase everything. 

Sam winced. "There was a... spell," he said. His language was far too passive for Bela's liking. "It would have blown all the demons away. But to do it—it required ripping out the heart of a virgin. We would've had to rip Nancy's heart out," he repeated, like someone else had said it the first time and he was only repeating it out of shock. 

Bela had only three words for him now. 

THAT'S COLD WINCHESTER 

She was only half serious, but Sam looked so ashamed. 

"I know! I know," he said, carding his fingers through his hair, gripping the strands hard in one fist. "Dean didn't want to do it. It was too terrible." A beat. "He was right." 

AND YOU? WHAT DID YOU WANT TO DO. 

Sam held the silence a moment too long. "I don't know," he said at last. "I just kept thinking... if it was her choice..." 

He looked absolutely destroyed. Bobby, too, had grown silent and white, too disturbed by an episode on which he had obviously never been properly debriefed. At least he wasn't looking at Sam as if he didn't know who he was. Bela released a breath, silently resumed her writing. 

IT WOULDN'T BE WORSE THAN WHAT LILITH DID TO HER. SHE TOLD ME. LILITH RIPPED HER INTO LITTLE PIECES OF FLESH FOR NEARLY AN HOUR. DOES THAT REASSURE YOU? 

Sam blanched and murmured _oh God_ , while Bobby spat. " _Je_ _—_ sus." While the two of them were still reeling, Bela steered the run of her thoughts back to what she had learned so far, attempted to synthesize the seemingly disparate pieces into a completed puzzle. 

For at least twenty-five years, Nancy had remained a virgin. She had, in her own words, experienced her own taste of hell here on earth, yet _would never choose the life Bela chose._ (Again, her words.) And in the end, with demons on her doorstep and every existential horror she'd ever had about the afterlife confirmed, she was happy enough to have her heart ripped out if it meant saving her friends and two complete strangers. 

Suddenly the answer—the completed puzzle picture—emerged before her: 

It was Nancy's unnatural strength of will that made her different. Separated her from these other suffering souls, like wheat parted from the chaff. The others were of ordinary spiritual stock—like her, like Sam, like anyone else—so they could do nothing but submit to the mark, seek to hate and destroy those who brought them this unutterable pain. Nancy could do something different, and so she did. Often. 

Bela was not entirely pleased at the discovery. _We can't all be that fucking virtuous_ , she thought, grimly, and then in amusement as she realized the entirely _apropos_ irony of that word choice. 

_When all's said and accounted for, you didn't get her, you bitch. You didn't get Nancy's soul. You're going to lose. I'll make_ ** _sure_** _you lose._

The pen was running low on ink as she bent to her book. 

I UNDERSTAND NOW. WHY NANCY CAN RESIST LILITH'S SPELL 

Sam, presently melting into a puddle of sorrow and regret on the floor, hastily composed himself when he saw the faded block letters. "What? How?" he said, in a question that was closer to a demand. 

Bela scribbled another message. Her last one—the ink in her pen had run dry. 

YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW NOW. LATER. TIME TO GO. 

"Finally," Bobby said. 

* * *

They got as far as the ground floor when Meat Loaf attacked. 

It wasn't actually Meat Loaf—Bela would have been sort of impressed if the Winchesters' ability to nettle and annoy encompassed one of the world's most celebrated rock singers. But the young man, introducing himself as Ronald before announcing he would eat them alive and barreling towards them, bore an uncanny resemblance. 

Bela blew him away with Bobby's shotgun in a second. The last thing she needed was another sob story. 

Next came two little girls. They weren't quite twins—not even the little girls in Kubrick's _Shining_ had been twins, now there was a nice bit of trivia for you—but Sarah and Rebecca looked so similar, down to their dark hair and eyes, their matching faded pinafores, she wouldn't have been able to tell them apart. They regarded her with flat, indifferent hunger. 

She hesitated. 

In the end, Sam took them. The shotgun blast tore them apart, scattered their individual ectoplasmic molecules across the dusty walls. Bobby froze, gaze pinned to where they had been standing, for one instant before Bela touched his back with her unoccupied hand, gently nudging him in the direction of the fireplace. The old man nodded hard and made a beeline. Once there, he stood before the empty hearth while they dumped their payload of salt around him to make a perfect, unbroken circle. They did the same to the entrance and kitchen doors, sealing off each ingress with lines of salt. 

"Now comes the hard part," Bobby told them. "Ingredients. We need hemlock, opium, and wormwood. You can find 'em in the—" 

"Cutlery drawer?" Bela whispered. Bobby turned to goggle at her, and she shrugged. "There's a false bottom." 

Bobby's expression held comically for a beat or two. "You scare me," the old man said finally, before hunkering over the fireplace with his spellbook. Sam blinked several times, but wisely made no comment. 

"So is this the part where we—uh, Scooby Doo it?" he asked instead. There was a shifting draft of air as now Bela was the one to cut her gaze over and stare, challenging him to argue that they _weren't_. 

Bobby was dropping a lit match over a pile of crumpled papers in the hearth. The paper caught the flame and blackened. "Gonna have to," he said, as he balanced the book in the fingers of his other hand. "The red hex box we need is in my—" He halted at that, waited, but Bela said nothing. "In my linen closet," he finished, still sounding put out. 

Bela smiled. 

Her smile disappeared when Sam fixed her with a fierce expression. "Be careful," he said, which sounded more like an order than any expression of concern. Then he scoobied across the room and up the stairs. Bela, for her part, made her way into the kitchen—the same kitchen where she'd first noticed within thirty seconds of entering that Bobby had secreted a quality stash of seance ingredients beneath a drawer bottom so fake it might as well have been made with cheesecloth. And the same kitchen where she'd nearly been killed. 

She was took pride in the fact she only shook a little. 

She seized the ingredients and shoved them into the pockets of her trousers, looking over her shoulder the whole while. There were no ghosts, no Meg, no Nancy. She slammed the drawer closed and breathed into her hands. No crystal of ice shone upon her palms. Her heart was beating hard enough to _awaken_ the dead, but that was not precisely _evidence_ of the dead. 

The hearth was roaring with flame when she returned to the safety of the salt circle. She huddled next to Bobby like she was seeking the fire's warmth, but just his presence was comfort enough. Her throat was beginning to hurt again, redoubled in its efforts to make her life difficult. 

No time to dwell on it. "Sam?" Bela whispered as she dropped the ingredients into Bobby's waiting palm. 

"I don't know," Bobby said. His face was ashen. "He's made enough blanket forts here since he was a kid—he should know exactly where the linen closet is." 

Apart from informing her exactly how she was going to tease Sam the next time she saw him, that information did not bode well. They waited another long moment, as... nothing. Not even a peep of Sam's trainers moving across a rug on the second floor. " _Damn_ it," Bela hissed, and even though the words enacted a harsh price—pain shredded her throat like she'd swallowed knives—it was worth it. She shot a look at Bobby, hoping _stay here and prep the spell; I'm going to get him_ was conveyed to the old man as effectively as it would have Sam, and went for the stairs. 

The steps brought her to a long hallway. The territory here was unfamiliar. The space seemed suddenly cramped with the omen of killing intent. As Bela crept towards the single dark entryway at the hall's end, the doors on either side opened with excruciating slowness onto two bedrooms like a pair of monstrous mouths yawning wide—calmly, leisurely, as though assured of a live and struggling meal. She peered into one room, not at all certain that she would not be seized and devoured, but all it revealed was the bunk bed where Dean and Sam Winchester had once slept. Bela gave the room the most cursory of glances before moving on. The shotgun seemed suddenly heavier on her back. She felt she would not like what she found in the next room. 

In the next room— 

"Sam," Bela breathed. He was sitting on the king-sized bed with his back to her, in the darkness, the drab curtains drawn across the room's only window so as to admit no sliver of light. His weapons were missing. At the sound of his name, he did not move. 

_Dead. He's already dead._ "Sam," Bela tried again, his name bubbling from her throat with the heat of boiling oil. She took a step towards the room. It was like midnight in here, like blackest pitch. You wouldn't guess it wasn't even noon—not if you had a thousand years, not if you had a thousand chances to guess. 

Finally the shape of him moved, rose like a black fly struggling to swim out of the plum, cherry-black waters of a Chambertin red. It was so dark. 

"Hi, Bela," Sam said, in Meg's voice. 

* * *

Bela fired a rock salt bullet into his shoulder. 

She was not quite ten feet away. The blast wouldn't kill him—she hoped. Probably hurt like hell, though. It was a damn fortunate thing she was a crack shot by seventeen; she could keep hitting him in non-vitals without much trouble. 

She might have to. Because Meg didn't just fuck off out of Sam Winchester's body after the first shot. Instead she turned and smiled. How strange, that the woman possessing the man made the man seem even larger, more fearsome. The huge, gentle hands that had tended to every trace of blood on her wounds would rip her in half without an ounce of effort. 

_Get out of him_ , Bela mouthed, because she could no longer make a sound. Even if she screamed for Bobby, no scream was going to come. _Get the hell out of him._

"Who's going to stop me?" Meg said. She tapped an inquisitive finger to Sam's lips, blinked his eyes superciliously. Even now, his eyes shone so hazel. They were the only thing that _did_ shine, in this darkness. "I'm just giving Sam a little taste of what I went through. Actually, I forget—this isn't even Sam's first rodeo. The slut demon that took me had a ride with him, too. Gosh—Sam will just give a ride to anyone who asks, won't he? Too bad that anti-possession tattoo doesn't work on Witnesses." 

Bela fired a second shot. The salt thudded into his other shoulder. Meg snarled and the lines of Sam's body trembled like a tuning fork; one more shot, Bela knew, and Meg would be out of there in— 

Then she saw the glint of gold in Sam's hands. A letter opener. Meg flicked it to Sam's chest, pressed the tip until the first crimson drip of blood evinced itself in the ridiculous plaid shirt—and Bela could only imagine that last detail, because again, the darkness swallowed everything. Some part of her feared, more than the letter opener, that Sam would simply disappear before her eyes, submit to be consumed by that black mass. 

"Don't push it." Meg's whisper was labored. "I wasn't done talking." 

Bela looked upon her with hatred. _Right. Because I need to hear your sad little tale again._

"Wrong," Meg intoned. "Haven't you ever wondered where Sam got that stupid knife? The one that kills demons? He didn't just pick that up at a flea market." Bela's face didn't change, and Meg looked disappointed. The girl had to cobble together one quarter of Sam's puppy dog face, one quarter of his angry face, and roughly half of his befuddled-at-something-Bela-said face to approximate the expression. "Boy, for some great thief you're awfully incurious. Guess he never told you he used to work with a demon," Meg went on, as the letter opener drew a lazy heart shape over his chest. 

Bela's lips moved soundlessly. _I've had three days to get used to the idea of not choking on my own blood for breakfast, tea, and dinner. Give me three more days and maybe then I'll start playing Agatha Christie._

Meg growled. "No, that was _me_ ," she cried, and the letter opener nearly wavered, a shimmering pinprick of gold. " _I_ was the one choking on my own blood, _I_ was the one who died! And all this year, he and his halfwit brother—after leaving me for _dead_ —run around with some random demon, a demon who's probably burned through dozens of innocent bodies for a _laugh_! They can't call themselves heroes. They don't have the _right._ They're hypocrites." 

This was the second time Meg had alluded to Sam and a demon. And yet— _That's his own damn business,_ Bela countered. _It's demons all the way down, dove, and I really don't give a damn what he chose to do with them in the past. And you're not telling me anything I don't already know about hunters._ Although now she was certain what it was Castiel was so concerned about, and—if the Winchesters' pet demon was still in play—why it might choose to get lost at the first beat of angel wings. _If you hate it all so much, why don't you get out of him and tell him yourself?_

Sam's mouth was drawn in a thin line. "I will," Meg said behind that unmoving line, "right after I kill him," but before she could let Sam's body go and fall on the letter opener, the shine of hazel flickered with surprise and he toppled to the side, like a chess piece being claimed and knocked off the board by the hand of an expert player. Meg whipped Sam's wrist out to regain control of the fallen weapon, but Bela leaped forward and stomped on his fingers with all her strength. The young hunter's other hand came up in a fist and slammed into her ankle, before the fingers beneath her foot broke free and closed around the blade. 

In the black, another shape moved. Bela had sensed it before she saw it—sensed the wind it brought with it that had knocked Sam aside, the deeper dark that only plagued her dreams. 

_Nancy_ , she said, in that moment suddenly heedless of what might happen to her. _Help him._

Nancy stepped within seizing distance of Sam. Bela could tell because now it was the gleam of a cross that drew her gaze across the room, moving like a pair of disembodied eyes—or a Cheshire cat's smile—through the black. Then the curtain fell open and a beam of mid-morning light struck Meg across the back. She bleated in alarm and Nancy was on her, driving a knee into the hunter's huge form, holding his body down with awful ease. Bela's hands found her hip flask and she turned it upside down over Sam's head. She felt Nancy's dark eyes upon her but didn't stop, not until every last grain of salt was in Sam's hair, on his ears and neck and cheeks, pouring down with the effluence of tears. 

Sam's body heaved and he _(Meg)_ gasped, choking on the air as much as the salt. Nancy was still perched on top of him, now balancing on both knees, a tiny girl in a pink vest and dark trousers subduing a man at least twice her weight. Bela had no time to appreciate this image, because she would probably be dead as soon as Sam was free. Even so, she appealed helplessly for the ghost's mercy. 

_You don't have to do this. You're not like the rest of them. You can make another choice._

Nancy's gaze on her was as flat as the two little girls'. 

_At least tell me how_ _—_ Bela wetted her lips, which were trembling. Beneath her, Meg howled. _At least tell me where you found the strength. To go on like you did._

_(because I I I)_

Nancy continued to look at her with such opaque, unreadable eyes that Bela was sure she would attack her again. But then they blinked and a different quality arrested them. Thoughtfulness. The mark on her collarbone glowed an angry red once and was still. 

"Some men are born and die angry," she finally allowed, slowly. "Convinced they've been cheated by the world, betrayed by the ones who should love them... they stomp and scream and throw a royal fit until the world gives them what they deserve. They may even be right sometimes, about the cheating and betraying, but even when they're not, that doesn't dim their anger in the slightest." Her eyes gleamed with the flash of some memory as her fingers rose to grasp the little silver cross. "My father was that way. My mother knew what he was when she married him, but... love will be love."

The chain twisted between her fingers. As it pulled tight over her knuckles, straining like the beads of a spent rosary, Bela decided she had never looked so much the part of an angelic executioner. She could not look away from it. "I was thirteen when he decided he didn't like what he saw," Nancy said. "All those curves and edges. It made him feel things he didn't want to feel. One more thing he had to put up with—wasn't it bad enough, that he had to feed me? When my mother realized I was being beaten..." 

Bela waited for the answer she thought would come. 

"She told someone." The pain in Bela's throat throbbed at that. Whether it thrilled to the strains of relief, or disappointment, or dull surprise, was beyond her ability to ascertain. "There was an investigation. She left him, remarried. A kind man. Our parish never forgave her the divorce, our neighbors and friends and family all turned their backs on her—but my mother did all that, to save me." 

And there was the difference. Bela's heart slumped in her chest. Her gaze slid towards the floor, descended until she was looking at her fingers, sunk deep into the salt-drenched tresses of Sam Winchester's hair. His eyelashes rested peacefully on his cheeks. Meg was gone. 

Nancy stared at her soundlessly for a long time. Then:

"She should have saved you."

She looked nearly human when she said that. Behind the gauzy veneer of the ghost was the kind, loving girl she had been in life; and for one instant Bela longed, so much, to have known her.

Bela's lips moved. _I wish..._ The pain in her throat was too great, crushed the words before they could be formed—before they could speak into existence the sort of world that was simply too excruciating to imagine—and she stopped. _I saved myself,_ she said, more resolutely. That was something no one could ever take away from her. Something that was _real,_ meant more than the sad fantasies of some child. 

"Yes," Nancy said. Her voice held neither approval nor judgment. She sounded, once more, as dead as the ghost that she was. "You did." 

She stood and stepped away from Sam's fallen body. The young hunter was beginning to stir, slowly unmooring himself from the shores of unconsciousness. Bela lifted her hands from his head and watched the salt slip through her fingers like grains of sand. 

"You'd better run," Nancy told her. "I can't hold this off for long. The pain—you can't imagine it. It's worse than anything Lilith ever did to me." 

_Will you go to..._

"Purgatory? Hell? I don't know. I don't remember." 

Before Bela could say anything else, she vanished. 

The curtain was still open, light slicing everywhere through the oblivion that had been Meg. The room no longer seemed possessed by the oppressive weight of death. Sam choked and sputtered and stumbled to his knees with complete gracelessness—but he lived. 

"My shoulders," he murmured, his big hands rising to palm the wounds on either side of him. His arms crossing over his chest made him look like he was asking for a blessing, while his hair was completely matted to his skull with salt, giving him the appearance of a sweaty prizefighter after a completed bout. It was a confusing mix of images. Then, with widening eyes: "Meg..." 

Wordlessly, Bela found his abandoned weapons on the floor with her foot—they were much easier to locate in the holy light of day—and kicked them over to him. She marched to the linen closet and threw it open. She took out the heavy, lacquered red box with both hands and motioned with her head to the stairs. 

The meaning was clear enough. 

_Move._

Sam moved. As they hurried to the ground floor, they found Bobby surrounded. Nearly every angry spirit they'd encountered was converging on his hunched, shivering form, even though the fire blazed brighter and higher than ever. Bela recognized Sarah and Rebecca, Ronald—Victor Henriksen, even, who turned an ironically amused gaze on her before advancing towards the fireplace. The salt circle had been swept away; a glance at the beams of light intersecting across the room with a light show's grandiloquence revealed that the windows had been thrown wide open, admitting disastrous draughts of air. 

The sense of mounting danger—of the knowledge that Bobby was seconds from an excruciating death—that pressed upon Bela seemed to heighten her senses. She could see the tremor that rocked the old man's hands as they continued to arrange the ingredients for the spell over a human shape drawn in chalk; could count the beads of sweat that sprang to his brow, split deep in concentration. Bela raced to him. 

So did Sam. There was a flurry of _pops_ as salt loads were discharged, dispersing the ghosts—but only for a moment. They kept reappearing. Sometimes even in the same place they'd been shot. _Like damn video game characters,_ Bela thought ridiculously—even so, she weaved her way among the undead until she was once more at Bobby's side, Sam shooting and swinging his tire iron around with every ounce of strength he had to give her that opening. She slammed the hex box down next to the other ingredients, and Bobby took a pinch of something dark and noxious-smelling from inside and shook it out over them, murmuring under his breath all the while; Bella just hoped it was the incantation and not more curses. Then Sam was next to her, and they were shooting and reloading and shooting and reloading— 

It wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough. Each time the ghosts respawned—bloody hell, this really was like playing _Goldeneye_ _—_ they were getting closer and closer, not further away. Bobby's voice rose as he recited the spell, either in desperation or because he was getting close to the end, but even this was no comfort, because the ghosts didn't give a single inch, didn't seem the least bit concerned, just kept creeping on them with the slow inevitability of oblivion. 

Meg had reappeared at the front of that line of death. She smiled at Sam, and his shotgun slammed to the floor before flinging itself with vicious conviction across the length of the library. Then she looked at Bela—who hadn't more than one or two salt rounds left anyway, but still burned with outrage as her own weapon flew through the air to join his. Before the young hunter could grasp the iron bar at his side to bring it down on Meg's head, the ghost's head swept back towards him and the room shook with the force of his dead weight crashing to the floor. Bela swung the arm bearing her own iron crowbar out in an arc— 

—and her forearm was caught in Meg's hand. Bela screamed at the coldness, the wrongness 

and the _rightness_

of that touch 

_(Alastair Alastair no no please more stop)_

and fell to one knee, to beg for mercy, for a reprieve from the endless pointless deaths she'd suffered at his hand. He stood before her, a column—a tower—a _mountain_ _—_ of smoke, one colossal nail chasing a solitary red tear down the plane of her cheek. She let her face rest in that huge palm as he soothed her in tones of oil and honey. _My little bee._

She no longer knew where she was. She no longer knew for what reason she had come here, and soon she would not know her name. She heard Dean Winchester, bound in chains above her, his tears dripping wet on her face because he _knew he would break soon, Bells, I'm not going to make it, I'm going to forget all about Sammy, sammysammysammy..._

Somewhere far away, a voice was calling her name. She couldn't make any sense of it. Then the voice said _Nancy,_ and someone else hauled Bela up beneath her elbows and screamed something about throwing the _big red box_ into the fire. Her limbs moved with boneless lethargy through the viscous pudding that was once air, and her hands closed around something. The touch of it was loathsome to her, and she threw it away from her without looking where it fell. 

Heat spread across her face—impossible heat, flung from the flower of fire that erupted before her eyes into full, bleeding bloom. Dean's tortured eyes looked back at her from deep within its petals. Then darkness. Then silence. 

The second voice spoke again. It was Bobby. 

"It worked," he breathed. "It—we did it. The Witnesses are gone." 

* * *

Other than attending to wounds and cleaning themselves up, there wasn't much left to do after the banishing of the Witnesses than to tidy up. Bobby's house was even more of a disaster in the aftermath of a full-scale spectral assault than it already had been; and so the three of them had committed themselves to the task of righting overturned chairs, sweeping up salt, identifying holes in the wall from bullets and salt loads that Bobby would have to paper over later. (The books stayed on the floor; Bobby had been curating stacks down there long before ghost attacks and would be doing so long after.) The old man was shaken up but in one piece; he credited that to the sudden appearance of Nancy, who _hadn't done so much of anything what given the Witnesses a good_ _staredown_ _and somehow scared 'e_ _m_ _off_ , according to his telling. He moved even faster than Sam, who still smarted from the two salt blasts in his shoulders and dragged himself around the house with an ancient man's torpidity. But what seemed to chain his movements to the earth, more than the physical wounds, was being told that he had been possessed—possessed _again_ , if what Meg said was true and her nameless tormentor had indeed been inside him. 

Bela wasn't going to touch that with a barge pole. Any more than she could examine what happened to _her_ , in those final, frantic moments. But there was one thing she _could_ address. 

"Castiel wanted you to stay away from that demon," she told Sam.

Sam struggled to straighten where he'd bent to lift his shotgun from the library floor. "What?" he said, as if he had not heard her. 

"You were working with demons," Bela repeated. Her voice was so soft that it was possible he hadn't. She spoke not with accusation, but with the sudden calm assurance that comes when grasping a proposition that should have been obvious all along. "You and Dean both. And when he was gone, you never stopped." 

She could have added more—how even the holy Winchesters would throw away their morals if it meant saving Dean from his deal, because what other reason was there for a Winchester to work with a demon—but to speak at length still scorched her throat like fire. It would have also been exceptionally cruel. No further words seemed needed, anyway, as a muscle in the young hunter's cheek jumped and clenched. The hazel eyes narrowed with guilt, or maybe just the consternation of being caught out. "Yeah," he said after a long moment's silence, permitting himself the smallest incline of his head. In the kitchen, Bobby grumbled and cursed as he attempted to wrest its warped double doors back into an equally warped frame.

"I expect a full explanation, of course. Not now," she added, when he opened his mouth. "Tomorrow. First thing. Or it's your head." She kept her glare on him—he stood there, frozen in a stance of what probably _was_ penitence—as she turned and went to see Bobby. 

"Need help?" 

Bobby looked up at the sound of her strained voice, then relaxed and stepped away from where he had been kneeling before the frame, leaving the doors to stand at disjointed attention against the wall. "Nah, it's fine. Just wish my back wasn't barkin' like a bitch, is all. Undid all the good Castiel did when he whammied me." Thankfully, he seemed oblivious to the conversation she and Sam would have to have in the morning. He leaned back on the balls of his feet and planted his hands on his hips as the realization that he would have to give up the doors for a lost job sunk in. "We could have used that useless angel," he said after a moment, sniffing hard and scrubbing a hand over his chin. 

"Yeah," Bela said. "We could have. But we didn't. That's how these things go." 

That startled Bobby. His hand fell away and he stared into her eyes, confounded and convicted by the absolute certainty he saw resting there. The old man was no stranger to cynicism, had grasped the ugly shape of the world a little better with every new experience time brought, every new monster that attacked his friends or loved ones—or simply butchered two little girls he would never have the chance to save—but even then, he was not yet that cynical. He was not that old. 

"Yeah," was all he said, staring at the deformed space that had once been a doorway. 

* * *

_"Bela?"_

_The name, leaving Sam's mouth, floats out of the darkness towards her. He lies prone on the wooden floor of the study, with only a few pillow cushions taken from the couch Bela has already claimed for her own to ease the discomfort in his back. He shifts beneath the sheets piled high above him. It is not cold, nor cold enough for a fire; but after today, the world will surely never be warm again. After today, Bela will never be asked to sleep in a car alone._

_Bela rises above the tide of low, fitful sleep to meet him._

_"You never told me..." Sam's voice slows, as if he is not sure how to put it. "What was different about Nancy?" he asks, finally. "How was she able to resist Lilith's mark?"_

_Bela stares into the darkness, through it. She sees the muted redness of the walls. Their flowing, floral patterns arch into shapes. She sees her father's face. Another joins it._

_The faces scream and suffer and burn in an agony of perdition._

_"She was a saint," she whispers, and she turns over and commits her spirit to restless dreams._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really hate how long it took to get this one out. (Grad school can be the Worst. Actually, no—that would be my lack of time management.) This was supposed to be the final chapter, but it got too long, so I split it up into this and a postlude. Most of the postlude is already written.


	3. Postlude

Bela knew she was not alone the moment she opened her eyes.  
  
Long years of sleeping with one eye open—over ten, to be precise—had habituated her to know when the dark rooms in which she slept moved with the shadows of monsters. She couldn't count the number of times her body had brought her awake in the middle of the night, how many times she moved for the gun or the knife (whatever was under her pillow) and put a bloody end to the thing or person that would have her. And before that, when there was no gun or knife, she always awakened mere seconds before her bedroom door creaked open and a familiar hand rested on her cheek.  
  
But it was not this instinct that pulled her into a sitting position on the couch. Even if she'd had the most sheltered upbringing imaginable, there was no way to avoid being dragged from fitful dreams by the wave of electricity that resurrected her flesh from sleep like a body from the grave. She could feel it in her skull; taste it in her mouth; sense it surge through her limbs with patient, ruthless, singular purpose. Castiel was here.  
  
Sam was curled up beneath a mountain of blankets at her feet, shivering with cold but otherwise sound asleep. She had no idea how he could do that—sleeping through a full-scale orchestra performance made more sense as far as she was concerned—until she remembered she was supposed to be a _singularity_ , someone who could see and hear angels as they truly were. Maybe this meant that she was especially attuned to when one happened to be in the room. Bela turned where she sat to face the kitchen.  
  
The angel's lanky figure cast a long shadow in the moonlight that spilled through the window, touched the floor of Bobby's kitchen in what seemed to her eyes to be a pale pool of milk. He stood with his back to the sink, watching her, not moving, and—after a moment's silent assessment on her part—not even breathing.  
  
Bela supposed she was to walk towards him now. Well, to hell with that. He would have to make the first move if he wanted her—he owed her that much, and a lot more, after today's horror show.  
  
Castiel stood there patiently. Infuriatingly.  
  
She was _not_ going to move.  
  
_Bela.  
  
_The word swept through her body like a breath. She nearly took a step towards him, unbidden; but at the last moment she stopped herself, and held one arm to herself petulantly, like a child. "What do you want," she muttered, and then her throat bobbed in a hard swallow when she realized her voice had uttered that sentence without a hint of strain. Her hands went to her neck, now clean and white and free of bandages. "I'm dreaming," she said, after another second had elapsed.  
  
_Yes.  
  
_His face was impassive, but his eyes seemed to smile on her. Bela sighed as she understood that this was a fight she was not going to win. The angel could probably stand like that for several millenia if he wanted to—probably _had_ stood like that, while pyramids were being built and entire dynasties were rising and falling. Too bad that seemed to be all he was good for.  
  
Bela padded on her bare feet into the kitchen. The door was in perfect condition, she noted. The carpet beneath her toes pressed cool and soft into her skin—exponentially more than Bobby's ordinary flooring permitted, the inevitable side effect of keeping company with an angel. As her shadow touched his, she nearly expected wings to erupt from his wiry silhouette and embrace her. Maybe she wanted that.  
  
_No. I don't want that. I don't like you.  
  
_She could feel them, though—the wings. Hanging impossibly and terribly huge around her.   
  
Lacquered marble at her back.  
  
And Nancy's tears, weeping a river and finding no hope at all.  
  
"Excellent job with the Witnesses," he told her once she was standing before him. She couldn't see the expression on his face, because she was obstinately refusing to look at him. He sounded pleased, like a teacher whose pupil had passed his test with flying colors.  
  
Except he hadn't taught her a damn thing. "What the hell was any of that?" she demanded in a raised voice, her face flying up to find his in the dark. She figured she could be as loud as she wanted now that her voice was back—and now that she knew this was a dream, so there was no danger of waking up Sam or Bobby. "More than that—you _knew_ about this, and you couldn't even send help? Not even one lousy cupid to stick the ghosts with arrows?"  
  
"The word you want is _cherub_ ," Castiel said. His tone had slightly cooled. "Who are not known for _sticking things with arrows._ But you already knew that, Bela. You were a good catechism student, when you wanted to be. So I don't need to remind you to read your Bible—you already knew we had our own battles to fight, because you already know what we are."  
  
Messengers. Guardians. _Warriors._ Of course Bela knew all that; but if the angels weren't going to do their damn _jobs_ , they didn't deserve for her to pretend they were anything but fluffy Hallmark mascots, and just as useless. "So those things that came for us..." she began, welcoming the anger inside her as it built to a storm.  
  
"Twenty hunters are dead," Castiel confirmed. "Including Olivia Lowry," he added, and Bela's mouth snapped shut on the question she was going to ask. "Lilith has a certain sense of humor, it seems. She picked victims that the hunters couldn't save."  
  
"So it _was_ Lilith." And then she said again, in a whisper: "You still could have helped." Of course, she'd never _asked_ for help, but not asking and not receiving was orders of magnitude better than asking and still not receiving. Her entire body was shaking, as if God Himself stood before her for her judgment—she didn't know if the shaking came just from the anger or the attendant terror of such a proposition.  
  
Something inside her still crumpled when his answer came again, as unruffled as ever. "We were preoccupied."  
  
_**Preoccupied—** _"Tell me then," she said, nearly spitting the words in her fury and despair. "What's the reason I was saved? The _real_ reason," she pressed, when Castiel's lips parted. "If you tell me it's because I'm the Virtuous Woman, then so help me—"  
  
Castiel halted, puzzled. "I told you before. You already know. You didn't belong there."  
  
Bela's fingernails were digging into the meat of her palms. She made a concerted, failed effort to relax them as the image of Nancy swam once more into her head. "Lilith could have raised anyone," she said. "Right? So why her, then? Why not my parents?"  
  
Castiel didn't need to be told who _her_ was. "As I said, Lilith has a certain sense of humor. She picked people that hunters would be anguished to see again, people they would be afraid to hurt even more after failing to save them. Your parents... fall very far of that criteria." He spoke the last words with a degree of awkwardness she found satisfying.  
  
"‘Course they do," she muttered. _I'd be fucking ecstatic at the chance to stick a knife in his guts again. Hers, too_. Castiel bowed his head slightly. No doubt he'd heard that thought as well. Good.  
  
For a long moment Bela did not speak, attempting to choose her words. The electricity the angel always commanded seemed to have scorched its way right down into her lungs. "Nancy was suffering," she said finally, forcing the words out like a thunderclap. "She was in pain, and _agony,_ and she _believed_ in all your nonsense—all your powers and principalities—and you just _let_ it happen to her. You didn't do a _thing_ to save her. You angels."  
  
Castiel said nothing, _evinced_ nothing. As she'd known he would.  
  
"She died because of me," Bela whispered.  
  
"Probably."  
  
His voice, emotionless, still landed on her like a punch. Insanely, there was an excellent chance he thought he was doing the comforting thing—giving her a bland equivocation instead of telling her the truth. _Yes, yes, of course she did, her blood is all on you._ Bela found she was shaking again, just as she had the moment Nancy had first rained down accusations on her.  
  
"I—I didn't think about what Lilith might do to the bystanders." Suddenly all that piss and vinegar had found a new target. He hadn't even needed to flick a pinion of a feather on those massive, invisible wings. The bastard. "I don't _think_ ," she murmured. "About anyone."  
  
"You could start," the gravel voice said, and Bela's eyes flicked up to meet his, alarmed. "Nancy is no longer in pain. Her soul returned to Heaven. You did that," he concluded solemnly. "If you helped us, you could—"  
  
"No. I'm not doing this." And then, before she could think about it long enough to stop herself: " _I quit._ "  
  
"You cannot do that. You were prophesied—"  
  
"No. _No._ You want my help? Then give me something. Give me one reason to continue working for you." Castiel was silent. "Were you expecting a saint? Didn't read the dossier before you got me, then? Bela Talbot doesn't work without a reward. You could at least give us Dean Winchester if we're expected to do everything for you."  
  
Now Castiel looked surprised. "You know why we can't do that. We have larger concerns—"  
  
"Bull _shit_. You think I don't know why you let Sam Winchester tag along with me? It isn't because of any prophecy. You just want me to babysit the future boyking of hell. Oh, don't think I didn't find out what the other side was saying about Sam before I went downstairs," she added, when Castiel's brow lifted. "Not to mention, you already had to warn him off of demons once. Face it: _You owe me_."  
  
She didn't know why she thought that would do anything. There was no confirmation, no denial of the assertion she'd thrown out. What she didn't expect was for dark amusement to shine in Castiel's eyes.  
  
"You want me to save Dean Winchester," he said slowly. Dangerously. "Do you expect me to heal him, too? Or are you happy to receive him in his current... condition?"  
  
She floundered. "But... I thought—"  
  
"No. I'm an angel. I'm not God." The angel's gaze lifted from her to rest on Bobby's wall calendar —forever open to the month of June—and then shifted back to her. "So you know what he is, then," he said calmly, as if he held all the cards. "What he's become."  
  
Did he know? Was he taunting her? After a certain point, she and Dean had developed a certain reputation among the locals. They were thick as thieves. Peanut butter and jelly. Blood and viscera.  
  
Murderer and corpse.  
  
"Screw you," she said. Castiel's anger swelled like a tsunami against her, and he moved forward, his presence crashing over her in one enormous crushing wave.  
  
"Do I need to reveal myself to you again?" His voice, momentarily unfettered from any petty considerations of what human ears could withstand, shone upon her with the pure, prismatic light she'd felt in that nameless gas station. It rattled every inch of the room—of every molecule of every _cell_ of her body _._ "You, of all people, should show me some respect."  
  
Already his voice was burning itself down to embers, but it didn't matter. Bela still shrank away until her back struck the wall. She almost expected him to seize her handprint and... _revoke_ it. Throw her back into hell, back to Dean Winchester's easy smile and waiting scythe. Maybe that was all she was trying to accomplish by antagonizing him like this.  
  
Castiel did not throw her back into hell. Instead he looked down at her arm—thrown protectively across her chest—and took a step away, tilting his head to stare at her with something approaching barely restrained bafflement.  
  
And suddenly all the fear left Bela. Well, not all of it. Because suddenly Castiel—big-time _angel of the Lord_ with the fuck-you wings—looked like one of her marks after a job. Like he didn't know whether to throw his weight around and scare the piss out of her—and he was right, she knew better than anyone just how easy that would be—or take it easy on her, let her push him around a bit. She suddenly realized she'd have had a field day with him if he was human; she could still recall with fondness the time she once tangled with a mob boss and walked away several thousand dollars richer.  
  
An unknown pressure equalized inside her at that realization. She also realized, too late, that the angel was probably still reading her mind. _You have to give me something_ , she thought at him with shaky defiance.  
  
"The prophecy is already written," Castiel pronounced. "With or without his brother, Sam Winchester's fate is tied to the Righteous One." But already there was a sour note in it. A note of doubt.  
  
"It won't be, if he realizes you can't help him."  
  
"The end of the world—"  
  
"I'm not saying the end of the world doesn't _matter_ to him. I'm saying he's positively _distracted_ when it comes to his brother. You have no idea what an incestuous pair those two make. He's going to run off half-witted on the tiniest lead to save Dean and cock up any chance we have to beat Lilith."  
  
Castiel seemed to be thinking. Bela had no idea what that looked like on an angel, but it probably involved something more advanced than an abacus and some scored lines in the dirt. After seeming to consider and discard thousands of possibilities in the span of a split-second, the angel fastened his eyes back on her, brightening with a new, inexplicable assurance.  
  
"God could heal him," he declared confidently. "If Sam Winchester succeeds in helping you stop Lilith... I will go to my Father myself. I will ask Him to save Dean."  
  
This was not something Bela expected to hear. The young thief still huffed. "Didn't know angels could lie."  
  
"I'm not lying." Castiel looked offended. "I would never lie. But it's important." He paused for a moment, and when Bela blinked, she realized he had somehow moved another few feet away from her unseen. She forced herself not to appreciate the gesture. "Do you know why the Witnesses came?"  
  
"Other than Lilith summoning them?" And then, as soon as she'd said that, a new recognition leaped into her brain. "It's one of those seals you were talking about, isn't it?" she said, unable to believe she hadn't seen it before.  
  
"Yes," Castiel said. "They're like the seals you would find on a locked door," he added, like human stupidity required spelling it out. "When Lilith raised the Witnesses, she broke it. There are over six hundred scattered throughout the world. She only needs to break sixty-six and then..."  
  
"I know. It's war, right? Demons, the whole works."  
  
"Worse. The father of demons. Lucifer walks free."  
  
Upon hearing those words, all of Bela's limbs seemed to immobilize at once. She took a deep, bracing breath, but it didn't matter—the fear was already lancing through her chest, stabbing her in the heart. She'd read enough Scriptures as a child to know... Castiel took her uncharacteristic silence as assent to continue.  
  
"Bobby Singer has... already learned the truth. The rising of the Witnesses is the first sign. More follow, and then the four Horsemen. And Lucifer ends every human life on the planet." Castiel folded his arms, looked away again—this time not at the walls of Bobby's abode, but into some metaphysical realm beyond the reach of human eyes, human senses. Into everything that would be lost if the _literal Devil_ —and all the horrors spoken of in the Bible—were allowed to win.  
  
"This is what my garrison has been trying to stop," he said with terrible finality. She knew she could not be imagining the fear that edged his voice now—tiny, imperceptible, but there. "This is what all the armies of Heaven are trying to prevent."  
  
He turned to her once more.  
  
"So tell him. If you and Sam Winchester can stop Revelation before it starts, we will save his brother." His head tilted, and the impression fled. The sweetness she could have once envisioned in that gesture now looked grotesque—like a baby bird considering how best to devour the writhing worm beneath its foot. His eyes pinned her where she stood, empty of all love or benevolence. "That should be motivation enough for your... assistance."  
  
"You—" The ice in his eyes flowed through Bela's veins. "That's fucking blackmail."  
  
"Then you can tell him," Castiel said, "exactly what happened to Dean. And you can fight this war without his help. Because either way, you _will_ fight it."  
  
His wings beat once. He disappeared.  
  
The cold did not. "You..." Bela sighed against the clenching of her teeth, strained to listen for any hint that he would return. _You son of a—  
  
_That was all she could manage. She sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees, sitting in the pool of light that seemed dimmer for the loss of an angel's shadow. She waited for sleep to come again— _real_ sleep—or for the world to end.  
  
Whichever came first.


End file.
